ROBBERT FLICK is a Southern California artist who uses photography as his primary medium. Flick, a native of Holland, received a B.A. at the University of British Columbia and an M.F.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been exhibiting his photographs for over 30 years and his work has been shown and collected at numerous private and public venues both nationally and internationally. He was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities during 1996-97 and the recipient of a highly prized Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. A 30 year retrospective of his work was held in 2004/5 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art accompanied by a major monograph, “Robbert Flick; Trajectories”, jointly published by LACMA and Steidl Verlag, Germany.

“Since childhood I have been deeply involved in the discovery, rendition  and conceptualization of the world through the use of the camera. At the core of what I do is  an abiding interest in photographic practice and the dialogs that continue to evolve around photography and its usage. I work in series that are built around  encounters over time in both natural and manmade environments.

Over the last fifteen years I have evolved a working method that addresses the visual complexities  and simultaneities  of the Southern California metropolitan area. I videotape the city in long continuous sweeps from a moving vehicle,  either  by following predetermined trajectories  or by systematically rendering  parallel streets.  From these tapes I select frames and construct large scale digital photographic files. The resulting  prints  are  a collection of visual textures and phenomena that capture the appearances of neighborhoods during particular moments in  time. This visual sampling  when woven together in consecutive frames and bands plays on frequencies of occurrence to reveal conditions and to suggest possible contexts for interpretation. The sequences may be read from left to right and top to bottom much like  a euro-centric text,  or dealt with as isolated but related image clusters where the eye travels across the visual field much like  it does when approaching a painting. I try  to find ways to invite viewers to scrutinize particulars;  to look at details in different places at almost the same time and to establish relationships between them.

I see my work as part of an ongoing process of documenting and constructing visual pieces that poetically explore the extraordinary diversity of Southern California  and its inhabitants, while  at the same time providing an inventory of the ongoing changes in our environment.

What do I look for in a photograph? This is perhaps the most difficult to answer, because I always respond to an image in terms of the context that I encounter it in. When reviewing portfolios I look at the presentation of the work, is there a correlation between the "look  and feel" of the work and the potential meaning of the work. Are visual cliches being used and if so are they used intentionally or by accident. How does the technical appearance of the work mesh with the content of the work. Does the work provide me with questions or answers? What does the work reveal, what is the correlation between the formal structures of the image and  the subject matter? In the end I look at the image not as a "picture of something" but rather " as an object about something” and I look at a portfolio as a revelation of a mind and sensibility at work.”